Word: yukon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Arizona hunter who could handle a boat as smartly as he could bring down a wild duck. He wanted his new wife to become "a killer of bears." One hour after their wedding, Bud and Connie boarded a ship for Alaska, bent on a canoe trip down the Yukon, third longest river in North America...
...construction worker; in his spare time built the Queen Beaver, a 19-ft. canoe made of Sitka spruce and canvas. In July 1942 they shipped the Queen north to Fairbanks, loaded her with $93 worth of canned foods and sacks of beans and flour, pushed off down the Yukon's Tanana tributary. The great river, first explored by Russians and men of the Hudson's Bay Company, rises in Canada's Yukon Territory and flows north west 2,300 miles into the Bering Sea. Bud and Connie planned to course down to within 200 miles...
...Helmericks soon found that the surly Yukon was no highway of ro mance. It carried "the silt of half a continent," and floating forests of trees and driftwood were a daily threat to the frail Queen Beaver. Arctic breezes whipped up icy waves that drenched the honeymooners to their skins. When they spent the night on a river island their down-lined sleeping bags were soon sodden with stagnant water...
When they took refuge in riverside cabins, the night was made hideous by the "howls, wails and shrieks" of the Yukon's "coal-eyed, shark-faced shrews"-three-inch rodents which eagerly devoured one another. Natives told the appalled young couple about the man who had died in his cabin and not been found for seven months. Rescuers who lifted his body found it "as light as ashes. The shrews had gone in from the cheeks and down inside, hollowing...
...civilization, hairdressers were amazed by Connie's hair; unwashed for nearly half a year, it had become gleaming and entirely dandruff-free.) The last 100 miles was a race against time: as they neared the Bering Sea the ice began to creep up on them from the Yukon's freezing banks. In late September they left the river, and Indians guided the frail canoe through the last miles of turgid swampland, to the town of Bethel...